☕ Quantum and why the Street still has this one wrong

Howdy! 👋 

It’s Friyay and the markets seemed to have gotten the memo that investing in optimism beats cowering in pessimism - all three indices charting higher as I type. 

I have no idea if that’ll hold but, then again, I am not particularly concerned. 

The action proves my point yet again.  

Be in to win or you won’t… win. 

Here’s my playbook. 

1 – The Street still has this one wrong 

Team Bentonville reported yesterday. 

And “the street” in its infinite wisdom is selling shares this morning because of cautious forward guidance and comments about consumer pressure.  

Ummm, yeah. 🤦‍ 

Revenue hit $177.8 billion — up 7.3% year-over-year. eCommerce grew 26% globally. The global advertising business — the one nobody on Wall Street was paying attention to two years ago and I told you would be a game-changer — surged 37%. Membership fee revenue up 17.4%. 

I’d hate to see what actual “trouble” looks like. 

Walmart isn't a retailer anymore.  

As I noted to the venerable Stuart Varney on Monday ahead of earnings — this is an AI story wearing a blue vest. 

One with 280 million customers walking through its doors every week. They know what you buy, when you buy it, how you pay for it, and – heck – probably what you'll need next Tuesday, too. 

You don't build an ad business growing at 37% without AI running underneath it. Amazon figured this out years ago. Walmart figured it out too — and the Street is still squinting at the comp sales line like it's 2015. 

I don’t think shares will stay down long. 

Keith’s Investing Tip: Buy the best, ignore the rest.® And if you have no idea how to do that, I’ll be here.  

2 – Still not convinced about quantum computing?  

The Trump administration is awarding $2 billion in grants to nine quantum-computing companies — and taking government equity stakes in every single one of them. (Read) 

IBM gets $1 billion of that to build an American quantum chip foundry, operating under a new subsidiary called Anderon, headquartered in Albany, New York. GlobalFoundries gets $375 million. D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Infleqtion each get roughly $100 million. 

Commerce says quantum computing has significant implications for national defense, advanced materials, biopharmaceutical discovery, financial modeling, and energy systems. 

Talk about being in firm command of the obvious – yeesh! 

I hope you’ve got at least one quantum choice in your portfolio like the OBA Family does. The way I see things, quantum’s “ChatGPT” moment is closer at hand than ever before.  

My choice is - fortunately - already the best in class and handily beating the S&P 500 since I re-introduced it to the OBA Family. Obviously, there are no guarantees that it’ll continue to charge higher but my view and my research makes me think that it very well could. 😀 

3 – Unka Elon's battery just charged Meta’s aspirations 

Team Zuck is deploying approximately $200 million worth of Tesla Megapack batteries to power its AI datacenter operations in Wyoming. (Read) 

Meta announced an $800 million, 715,000-square-foot facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming — specifically optimized for AI workloads — expected to come online in 2027.  

Power – to a point I have made many times - is the whole ball game. 

You can build the biggest GPU cluster in the world but that won’t matter one iota if the grid can't feed it cleanly. 

That's where Megapack walks in. 

GPU-intensive AI training runs can cause power fluctuations as sharp as 90% at frequencies up to 30 Hz … not something your run of the mill average local utility was ever designed to handle. You need a battery buffer sitting between the grid and the servers — absorbing the spikes, smoothing the delivery, keeping the whole thing stable.  

Three guesses what Tesla engineered, and the first two don’t count. 

MyPOV: I said back in 2011 that Tesla's real business was energy and data — not cars. People laughed. Not so politely, I might add. 

I may not own enough shares but more importantly, do YOU? 🤔 

4 – Stellantis: $70 billion and a prayer 

Remember when I said Stellantis was more likely to see $5 before it broke $15? (See #4) 

Well… 

Since then the stock’s gotten annihilated and the divvy clobbered. And now, a new CEO is standing in front of investors in Auburn Hills with a $70 billion turnaround plan and a brand-new name for it — "FaSTLAne 2030." I am not making that up. 

Here's what's actually in the plan.  

• More than 60 new vehicles.  
• Major refreshes on 50 models.  
• Positive free cash flow targeted by 2027 — coming from a loss of 4.5 billion euros last year.  
• Revenue growth from €154 billion to €190 billion by 2030.  
• And a partnership list that now includes Jaguar Land Rover, Chinese automaker Leapmotor, and Dongfeng Group. 

The last line item is what really catches my attention. 

Stellantis is now another in a long line of Western automakers that have decided to partner with Chinese makers because they have no choice.  

The only question now is whether Filosa can actually execute — because strategy decks are easy. Turning around 14 brands, cutting European capacity by 800,000 units, and launching a unified platform while the Chinese are eating your lunch in every market simultaneously?  

That's a different animal entirely. 

MyPOV: I still wouldn't touch STLA here. A 25-page plan and a snazzy acronym don't fix the fundamental problem — they're still trying to out-product companies that out-cost them at every level of the supply chain. Leapmotor builds its own batteries and powertrains in-house. Stellantis does not. That gap doesn't close with a new platform in 2027. Watch the execution, not the presentation. If they hit positive free cash flow in 2027 and show margin improvement in North America, I'll revisit. Until then — cool beans, not for me.  

$5. 

5 – The Steroid Games & a flyer 

Okay, sports fans. 

My grandfather used that line whenever he wanted to make a point — a nod to old-school radio and announcers who actually had a personality.  

I use it when something deserves more attention than it's getting. 

This qualifies. 

The "Enhanced Games" kick off in Las Vegas this Sunday, and yes — they're exactly what they sound like. A sanctioned athletic competition where competitors are allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs. (Read) 

Forty-two athletes are registered to compete in swimming, track, and weightlifting events. 

WADA and the IOC are predictably outraged, and I wouldn't expect anything less. But let's get serious. 

If the IOC were genuinely committed to clean sport — and if there were real institutional incentives to follow through — the doping scandals that have dogged every Olympics for the past 40 years wouldn't exist. Just sayin’. 🤷‍ 

To be clear, I'm not condoning cheating, drugs, or shortcuts of any kind. But I'll tell you where I'm coming from on this one, because it's personal. 

I spent the better part of a decade fighting full-contact martial arts and another doing triathlons in the top 10% as an amateur. Many with my bride including this go-round at the Escape from Alcatraz. 

We’ve made friends the world over but in doing so I've pushed my body hard, paid the price, and earned a few scars I wouldn't trade for anything.  

These days — and I say this with the appropriate ahem — I'm a lot more interested in recovery than I used to be. So when someone says they want to find out what the human body is actually capable of when all the guardrails come off?  

Yeah. I'm listening. 

Breakthroughs in every field happen when people push hard against the edges of what's possible. Space gave us memory foam and water filters. Warfare gave us the internet and GPS. Some of the most important medical advances in history came from the most extreme circumstances imaginable.  

Push the boundary far enough and you almost always discover something nobody expected. 

The Enhanced Games are being put on by Enhanced Group — billionaire Peter Thiel's outfit — and the real business model isn't ticket sales. It's a full range of health, performance, longevity, and recovery products, including peptides, which have become enormously popular in recent years. 

Worth noting: GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy and Lilly's Foundayo — one peptide-based, one not — are already taken by roughly 1 in 8 American adults, with J.P. Morgan projecting that number could top 30 million by 2030. And that's before the pill versions really take hold. 

Anyway — full disclosure — I own 200 shares, bought 'em for the heck of it, and I consider what I have spent to be complete throwaway money. If the company goes to zero, fine. If it works, it's a very nice dinner a few years from now. 

Meanwhile, I've tucked 'em on the shelf and do not intend to try to manage the trade in any way shape or form. It’s hero or zero time. 

MyPOV: Companies like this one are not a sports story. What’s happening is a longevity and performance science story with a potentially serious commercial engine behind it. Peptides, recovery protocols, and human optimization products are a multi-billion-dollar space that most investors haven't seriously looked at yet — and – not for nothing - Thiel doesn't usually back things without a real thesis. So there is that. 

DO NOT KID YOURSELF: The company is a high-risk, early-stage, gamble because this kind of controversy will keep institutional money on the sidelines for a while. DO NOT BUY SHARES if you can’t afford to lose every dollar of what you pay to do that. But if you like planting a small flag before the crowd shows up — and you can afford to lose every dollar of it — it might be worth a flyer. Emphasis on “might.” 

Keith's Investing Tip: The biggest gains rarely come from what everybody's already watching. 

Bottom Line 

You attract the energy you give off. Invest in optimism and attract profits. Good vibes and positivity are contagious. 

Speaking of which and as always, let's MAKE it a great day and finish the week strong. 

And one last thing. 

We’re heading into Memorial Day weekend here in the United States. 

It’s an important reminder that the freedoms we enjoy were paid for by those who gave everything. So before you fire up the grill or check the markets — take a minute this weekend to remember why we can.  

And to every veteran and Gold Star family reading this, from one military family to another, thank you for your service. Full stop. 

Now let's MAKE it a great day – you got this! 

Keith 😀